The other night I ran into an old friend who now lives in China. Within minutes of saying hello Becky chastised me for not writing on this blog more frequently. My first reaction was internal and was something to the effect of: Wow, I can’t believe someone actually reads this. The second reaction, the one I actually spoke aloud, went more like: Listen, the truth is that there’s very, very little that occurs in my daily life that’s of interest to me, let alone anyone else, and that’s why there haven’t been any new posts of late. I’m unemployed, indolent, desultory and generally feckless: there’s simply little content from which to draw. She argued the line that the point was to make the banal less boring, to take the daily drudgery and twist it into something worth reading. Â Her believing that I was capable of doing that was gracious, and in turn I promised her I’d get something worthwhile up asap.

The following essay, Did I Tackle Your Christmas Tree?, is my shot at that goal. I can’t guarantee much, but in my defense, I warned against that from the get-go. Then again, the point isn’t the quality of this essay, nor my ongoing neuroses. Rather, if there is a point, it’s this: thanks Beck.